STELLA | Your First Illness in Ithaca Will be the Worst of Your Life

September: Cornell’s campus is warm and breezy with remnants of summer left over, and our local fauna scurry across the quads to pick up fallen crumbs of Zeus’ mac’n’cheese. The returning students can breathe in, and almost absorb, the giddiness around campus that radiates from our puppy-eyed freshmen. They’re still blazing with the recent-grad, on-to-the-next-stage-of-my-life buzz that comes from spending the first couple of weeks on a college campus. Class of 2023, it’s true, college is a blast. You’ve got some wonderful times ahead of you, but if you think Ithaca will always be this fairytale-esque, you’re shit out of luck.